The Meaning Of Life
by Hel-Lokisdotter
Summary: A simple question - what if Rudy hadn't died in the Himmel Street blast? This is my answer. AU, obviously. Rudy/Liesel. Now finished and edited.
1. Life Goes On

**Disclaimer: **The Book Thief and all affiliated characters belong to Markus Zusak. Life is the only one of these characters who is mine.

**A/N:** I know, it's been done before. But I'm really interested by this concept, and by the writing style. Powers of copycat, GO!  
I'm hoping to extend this to go on quite a while. Tell me what you think!  
And concrit is always love.

**LIFE GOES ON**

You may or may not have read a book called 'The Book Thief'.

If you have, then you will know about Liesel Meminger, the book thief from Himmel Street. If not, then you will not, and there is nothing I can do about that.

But that book's narrator was not me. That book was narrated by Death. My brother.

I am close to him. I am close to all of you, whether or not you know it, and while all of you will meet Death some day, you have all already met me.

But I am not Death.

I am Life.

**THE DIFFERENCE  
He notices the colours.  
I notice the smells. There are a lot of different smells, in my line of work.**

**He was also much busier than me in that year of 1943.**

This, however, is not a story about Death, or even death. It is still a story about the war, though. The war that tore the whole of Germany apart, and most of the rest of the world with it.

This is a small story about a survivor.

Or rather, two survivors. The street smelt like tin and fire and burning dreams, and there were two survivors.

The first was the book thief.

The second was a boy with hair the colour of lemons.

**A SMALL FACT  
Sometimes, I can change things**

But first, an explaination is probably in order.

My brother's function is perfectly, horribly clear; he is the end. Sometimes I think that my gift is crueler.

I am not cruel. I am just me.

But I carry souls, just as he does. And just as he has, I have been in some of the worst places in this world. I saw Auschwitz, Dachau, the trains. I saw Russia and Siberia, I saw London in the Blitz.

And in each of those places, I left my own gift. Or my own curse.

In each of those places, I left a spark of life in a mother's belly, as cells and energy began to coagulate into a human child.

I often saw my brother, in the worst of those places. On the trains, with those bone-people clustered together like oxen, alone and afraid, I trailed close to him. He didn't see me – he never does – but I stuck close to him, anyway, carrying those fragile human souls in my arms.

For companionship, perhaps.

Or, perhaps, in places as bad as that, purely because it is a relief to see an end to a life you have brought, which turns out to be filled only with pain. Once, on one of those trains, I pressed a limp soul into the belly of a woman with hollow eyes and despair in her looks. It is at times like those when I realise, once again, how cruel my job can be.

And how blessed my brother's. It was not a moment later that he plucked two souls from the woman's cooling flesh, and rested them gently over his shoulder as he moved on.

I was not seeking my brother that night, but I found him nonetheless, amid the screech of air-raid sirens and the skies that smelt like smoke and pain.

I was there on different business. But I followed him anyway.

**THE DIFFERENT BUSINESS  
In a crowded basement filled with cries, in Gelb Strasse nearby, a new life was preparing to enter this world.  
In Himmel Street, a lot of lives were leaving it.**

The infant's soul hung in my arms like a piece of cobweb, fragile and feather-light. Death's arms and shoulders were draped in them, the souls piled in his arms.

I followed him into the tailor's shop and the home behind it, as the bombs buzzed and hissed in the air, seething into great clouds of black moke and noise. Inside, it was quieter. I watched my brother lift Barbra Steiner's soul out of her body, then sling the children's over his shoulder.

And still I waited.

Arms thick with abandoned souls, Death started into the next room. I waited in the hallway.

I knew what – who – was in there. Hadn't I sent their souls, their lives, to Barbra myself?

Bettina and Rudy Steiner. And the nameless infant life in my arms made three.

Three children.

One choice.

**A QUESTION  
Was it the right choice?**

Whether or not it was the right choice made no difference to me. It was the choice I made, without even thinking, and, as Death stalked away from the burning, falling room, I reached out and grabbed the soul with the lemon-yellow hair from his arms.

It wouldn't come free. No matter how I pulled, it wouldn't come free.

But that didn't matter. I had been expecting it. Death's grip is not a loose one. That was the choice I had made, without even thinking.

Sometimes, the flashes of humanity I have scare me a little.

Sometimes, the lack of it does.

Either way, the moment I dropped the infant's soul into my brother's arms, the other soul, the one with the lemon-yellow hair, came free as easy as breathing. Not that I breathe, but you know what I mean.

I don't like changing things, and with good reason. But I knew how it would go, if I did not – all of it, every moment of the book thief's life from then on. I am Life, after all. I like to keep an eye on the children I bring. And to some extent, too, I can see that life stretch forwards from the moment the child is born.

But I didn't know what would happen if I stole Rudy Steiner from Death. And I've always been a sucker for surprises.

He didn't notice, of course. Death doesn't know Life. And he wasn't watching the souls in his arms, not even Rudy's, not even the Hubermanns'. He was watching the sky, the flaming red-gold sky, as we left the burning rubble of the Steiners' home. Around us, Himmel Street writhed and burned as it collapsed into ash.

Death went on walking.

I hung behind.

After a moment, I turned to the remains of the house again, Rudy's soul cradled in my arms as lightly as the infant's had been. It took me several minutes to find the place where his room had been, now buried under the scattered, smoking remains of the roof. Several more minutes to find his body, which was not where it had been.

It was draped in a fallen tree at the end of Himmel Street, hidden by the thick branches. His lemon-coloured hair was singed, and there was blood on the side of his head, but besides that, he could almost have been sleeping. The same branches cradled his sister.

Gently, I lifted the soul in my arms. Normally, you see, the souls I carry go into the mother's belly, but I knew that was wrong. Don't ask me how I knew. I just did.

So, carefully, lightly, I pressed the life into his heart.

It went in with a sort of dragging noise, like something being pulled underwater. I watched, concerned, afraid. I rarely work miracles.

And when you work a miracle, it's very difficult to tell whether it's a curse.

After a moment, a small flush of blood rose in his cheeks, and as the bombs went on falling, the buildings crashing down around us like dominos, I heard the tiniest, tiniest gasp of breath. Barely even there, but enough to let me know that it was alive.

Above him, his sister hung like an abandoned doll, a tiny scrap of humanity with smouldering hair catching in the rising wind.

It breaks my heart. When I see these empty vessels, that used to be humans, used to be alive, it breaks my heart. Every time.

I cannot understand how my brother does not go mad. Or maybe he does.

Anyway, as soon as I had released Rudy's soul, after I had performed the greatest of miracles, there was nothing more to do. And a thousand more places I had to be.

Because even in that winter of 1943, Life goes on.


	2. Beginnings & Endings

**A/N:** I got a copy of the Duden dictionary! (I am quite insanely happy about this, considering I wasn't even looking for one)  
Ahem. Anyway...  
I'm seriously flattered by the response I got to the first chapter, so I'm just hoping I don't promptly screw up the second. Concrit is loved.

**BEGINNINGS & ENDINGS**

Rudy awoke from a dream of drowning, and found himself unable to breathe.

For a moment, he panicked. Then he realised that he was still dreaming, and took a deep gulp of blessed air.

He should be up, he thought muzzily. There were things to be done. Places to go. Food to steal, maybe. Anyway, he should be up. From the light blazing through his eyelids, it must be morning. Why hadn't Mama woken him?

He ached all over, from head to foot, and he couldn't think why. It didn't really matter, after all. He was probably just stiff. It would pass.

Yawning widely, he opened his eyes.

There was only darkness there. Darkness, and a strange, dull smell of dust and smoke.

And Rudy panicked. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't anyone? Lunging out of his bed – only it wasn't his bed, it was something else, something hard and rough and almost like bark – he clawed at the dark air, coughing.

**WHAT WAS RUNNING THROUGH RUDY STEINER'S HEAD  
**"_**Es ist nur einen Traum… nur einen Traum…"  
**_**It's only a dream**

I think, now, that he probably knew better. It wasn't a dream. Not at all.

But it probably felt like one, in the dark and the stifling stillness of where he lay, buried in a little heap of rubble and tangled branches at the end of the denuded Himmel Street.

His mouth was dry. Too dry. He tried to scream for somebody, anybody, to wake him up from this, but nothing came out except a garbled croak.

Now that he was fully awake, and fully aware, his eyes were beginning to adjust to the dim grey light. He could see shapes, a few colours… not much. Not enough.

But too much, even then. He turned to find Bettina's ragdoll body hanging broken behind him, open eyes staring and dull even by that poor light. Her back was broken over one of the sturdier boughs, but what had most likely killed her was the explosion that had blown her apart from the waist down. Her blonde hair was dark with blood and ash.

Rudy managed to scream, this time. Wordless, voiceless, a scream of absolute horror.

_Somebody wake me up… please, somebody wake me up!_

But nobody did.

He could hear footsteps, now, and the garbled voices of the LSE men, a low, meaningless hum. They hadn't heard him, he realised, and tried to scream again. But all that happened was that dust caught in his throat and in his eyes, turning his roar into a hoarse cough as he crawled forwards again, searching for a way out.

"Rudy! Rudy!" It wasn't his voice. He strained his ears, breathing a blessed sigh of relief.

"Liesel!" he croaked, rolling to the side as her foot set a stone rolling down inches away from his head. She didn't hear him.

"Rudy!" she screamed, over and over again, her muffled voice fading away, as did her footsteps. He groaned inwardly.

"Liesel! Liesel! _Saumensch_!" The last word came out almost clear. Encouraged, he yelled it again, at the top of his voice. "_Saumensch! SAUMENSCH! SAU…_"

"Crucified Christ!" This was a man's voice, low and shocked. "Hellner! _Schnell, schnell_! There's somebody _alive_ down here!"

And then there was light.

Red and burning, it flooded into the imprisoning ruins like water. He gasped for breath, the air fresh and thick with dust. One heartbeat, two, thundering in his ears, and then the light was blocked out again, as the last chunk of stone was pushed aside, and the LSE men knelt at the rim of the hole they'd made.

"Son? Are you hurt?"

Rudy opened his mouth, meaning to answer. But then Bettina's body, limp and lifeless, caught his eye again, and he found himself crying, deep, hacking sobs which turned to retching. Collapsing forwards onto his hands and knees, half-in and half-out of the burning morning, he vomited up everything in his stomach. He felt limp, boneless, as though his own control over his body had been taken away along with everything else.

The second of the two men, the man called Hellner, swore under his breath as vomit splattered his knees and calves. But although his lip was curled in something like disgust, there was pity in his eyes.

"Are you hurt?" the first man repeated, when Rudy had emptied his stomach and his tears were starting to dry. Their hands, black with soot and dust, reached under his armpits, hauling him bodily out of the ruins and into the fresh air.

"Mama..." was all Rudy could manage, childishly, nauseatingly. "Is Mama... is she hurt?"

The first man frowned, as people tend to when they're faced with the sort of question they don't want to answer. After a too-long second, Hellner came to his rescue.

"We haven't checked all the houses yet," he told Rudy soberly. "We've dug out... a lot of people. I don't know if your mama's one of them. Can you stand?"

"I... I think so." His skin still crawling and drying vomit crusting on his lips, Rudy scrambled onto his hands and knees, then, putting all his strength into one more push, forced himself onto his feet. His legs felt like wet rope, shaking under the weight of a heavy heart, and his mouth had the bitter taste of bile as he looked along the flattened desert of Himmel Street. "Yes," he said numbly, after a moment. "Yes, I can stand. But it hurts."

"I'm not surprised," Hellner said, dark, dusty hand still under Rudy's arm, propping him up. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, when Lorenz called just now..."

"You're lucky to be alive," Lorenz finished for him, unsmiling.

Looking up and down the denuded remains of the place that had been his home, Rudy felt like arguing. He was anything but lucky.

It was gone. That echoed in his mind, over and over again. It's gone. Everything's gone.

Hubert's Oval, the track where he had false-started twice on the last race, the tailor's shop that smelt of his father... The school. The houses. The people.

But not Liesel. Liesel was alive. He _knew_ Liesel was alive. Hadn't he heard her voice?

"_Saumensch!_" he yelled, as loudly as he could manage, dust and soot falling in clouds around him as he turned. The LSE men exchanged frowns over his head, but he didn't notice. Didn't care. He shrugged their well-meaning hands away, and then he was running, face soot-blackened, bare feet thudding on the burnt ground. Jesse Owens. But there was no finish line to this race. No tape to break over his chest. Just his heart, thudding in his ears, the pounding of blood in his head, the fear, the rage, the pain that pushed him forwards, his voice sounding hoarse and useless.

"_Saumensch! _Liesel! Where are you?" Pain blossomed in front of his eyes, his vision blurred by tears. The men behind him were starting to give chase, and he knew they meant well, but he didn't want them to stop him. Not yet. "_Saumensch_!"

"Rudy?"

It was her. He knew it straight away, but through the haze of tears and darkness, he couldn't see. Her voice was trembling, tired, weak, disbelieving.

_Liesel._

He didn't say it out loud. He couldn't. But his lips formed the name, and he stopped dead, doubling over and choking on the air.

"Rudy!" She ran over to him, reaching him just as he collapsed, the LSE men catching him and propping him between them. For a moment, silence hung between them; the book thief and the boy with hair like lemons. It was an adult silence, pregnant with pain and a shared grief.

Then, with a suddenness that shocked even her, she rushed forwards, tears making tracks of mud though the dry dust on her cheeks, and came to a stop inches away from him. Her eyes were red, puffy from tears, and under the dark dirt, her face was pale.

He managed to smile, just for a second.

"You've got... you've got dust on you," he told her, through the blood roaring in his ears.

She said nothing. But her face was crumpling under the weight of an adult grief, and the smile she gave him was old and tired. His own smile faded away, as quickly as it had come.

"Mama?" he whispered.

"Oh, Rudy..." Her voice cracked, as broken as Himmel Steet, and those two words told him everything he needed to know.

And it flooded in on him again, and somehow, there were more tears. He thought he had cried the last of them out, but they were back again, and the air seemed suddenly thick, difficult to breathe. She was crying, too, deep, racking sobs that matched his, and for the first time, he found himself wondering about the rest of Himmel Street.

It was unthinkable. No Hans Hubermann, chatting with Papa on the street. No Rosa Hubermann, who had come into school to yell at Liesel for a hairbrush that wasn't a hairbrush. No Frau Diller, with lollies and _heil Hitler_s and a face like a hatchet. No Freddy or Kristina Muller, no Frau Holzapfel, no Andy Schmeikl, Viktor Chemmel, Pfiffikus... He even wished for Franz Deutscher, for a moment, just to have somebody to hate. Somebody to break the endless, roaring silence.

There was nobody. Just Rudy, Liesel, and a dead street. The LSE seemed distant and unimportant; passers-by, nothing more.

The emptiness howled in his ears like a storm breaking.

"Papa's dead," she said eventually. Her voice was as fragile as glass. "Mama, too. I was with them when I heard you... when I heard you shouting."

"Bettina's dead, too," he told her, bitterly aware of the smell of vomit and earth hanging over him like a shroud. "She was behind me. When I woke up, she was behind me." Then, his voice flat and empty, he asked stupidly "What happened? Were we bombed? Why didn't the sirens wake me?"

"There were no sirens." She sounded absolutely certain. "I was awake. There were no sirens. Not... not until later."

He managed to straighten up as the men holding him withdrew. Silence filled the air. His hand found hers.

**A THOUGHT**

**There is nothing as terrible as an ending.  
There is nothing as wonderful as hope.  
There is nothing as painful as a new beginning.**


	3. The Way To Hell

**A/N: **I'm honestly amazed (and pleasantly surprised) by the response this story's got so far. You have no idea how much you people have boosted my confidence. ^-^

Concrit, however, is absolute love. As harsh as it takes!

**THE WAY TO HELL**

"What do we do now?" His voice sounded flat and distant in his ears. Childish. He _felt _childish, alone and lost in the remains of his world. "Crucified Christ, Liesel, what do we _do_?"

They were still standing at the end of Himmel Street, like statues carved from dust and broken dreams. With their hands still tightly interlocked, standing close to one another as though they anchored each other to sanity, they looked, through the dust and smoke, like one form, one shape. Around them, LSE men moved like ghosts, but the pace was slowing now, the fires dying out.

There had been no more cries from underneath the rubble.

They had been standing there for over an hour now, trapped in the raging emptiness like flies in amber. For both of them, the rest of the world was fading away; there was only Liesel, and Rudy, and the ruins of home. The air smelt of burning, and of pain. It hung over them like a spectre, the dawn and the distant birdsong mocking the almost sanctified silence.

"I don't know," she admitted thickly, after several moments. "Wait, I suppose."

He didn't ask _for what?_ Neither of them could have answered, and he knew it. But they had to wait.

Maybe, insanely, if they waited long enough, the world might turn under them and the seasons change around them, and the pain would be erased. Maybe, if they waited long enough, they would wake up from this dream – this nightmare – and be yawning in their beds, dragged out of sleep to sit through another day of lessons. Maybe, if they waited long enough, something might change.

Nothing changed. The sky was the colour of rust, and it stank. Around them, Himmel Street remained as it was, a grotesque parody of home, with skeletal beams clawing at the gathering light and tiles and stone littering the edges of the craters where the bombs had fallen. Nothing changed. Maybe, Rudy thought bleakly, nothing ever would.

"Rudy?" Her voice quavered, pressed down by the weight of the burning morning.

He nodded silently, conscious of the heat of her hand in his. It took him a long, lingering moment to realise that she had called him Rudy. Not _saukerl_, Rudy.

It was only then, too, that he realised he had called her Liesel.

He didn't wonder why. This was too big for the childish comfort of familiarity; nicknames and jokes jangled around this wide emptiness like a few coppers in a great coffer meant for gold.

She was silent, too, for another long moment, and he wondered if she was thinking the same thing.

"Rudy... I'm sorry."

It took him utterly by surprise, and for a moment, his grip on her hand slackened. It felt dizzyingly as though he was falling, and he immediately closed his hand around hers again, tighter than ever.

"You didn't drop the bombs," he told her, his voice sounding alien to himself. "You didn't start the war. It's not your fault."

"But I'm sorry, all the same."

The emptiness echoed around them, grey and distant now that the fires were out. He turned to face her.

"So am I."

She smiled weakly, tears still running pale tracts down her dusty face, and took his other hand. In the silence, he could hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears.

Overhead, a bird started to sing, shrill and rippling, as though nothing in the world mattered. As though that simple sound had broken down some barrier inside her, she began to sob again in earnest. She didn't say anything through her tears. It wouldn't have mattered if she did; he knew how she felt. What she had lost. Tears threatened to choke him, too.

Biting them back, he squeezed her hands.

"We've still got each other," he told her, his voice cracking, made husky by the tears clotting in his throat. "We still have that. It'll be all right, Liesel. Just wait and see."

If only he could believe it himself, he thought bitterly, and closed his eyes against the tears behind them.

A split second later, her arms were around him, and she was sobbing into his shoulder as though she could bring the world she knew back with her tears. Awkwardly, he put his arms around her as well, burying his face in the crook between her neck and her shoulder.

Through the tears, the pain, and the ever-present dust, she smelt of paint. Like Herr Hubermann, Rudy thought, and it hit him like a hammer blow, as though it were his own papa whose eyes were rusting in the middle of a broken world. Tears streamed down his own cheeks, and he no longer cared who saw him crying.

Time passed, as time does. But neither of them could have said if it was a minute or a hundred later that they both gave one last, hacking sob, almost at the same time, and straightened up. Brown eyes and blue eyes, set in dusty faces slick with tears and mucus, met each other in total understanding.

Nobody could ever have said who started it. But then, in the dust and the emptiness and the grey, pain-lit dawn of a new life, who cared?

They were alive.

And both of them knew what might take away the bittersweet, cloying taste of death.

Their lips came close. So close.

**WHAT THE ROAD WAS PAVED WITH  
Good intentions.**

This particular good intention was that of the LSE man, Hellner, who was in no position to see that some things were still unfinished, and who had finally succeeded in procuring somebody who might know what was going on.

"_Der Polizei..._" he began, a little hesitantly, then paused.

Rudy turned first, looking almost shamefaced, as though he had been caught doing something he shouldn't have. Then Liesel, pulling her arm sharply from around him as reality came flooding back.

Hellner frowned, clearing his throat to hide his own discomfort.

"_Na, komm_," he told them briskly. He had been about to explain the situation in more depth, but now, faced with two solemn, pain-filled gazes, too adult too soon, he found himself unable to form the words. Unable even to explain this to himself. So, instead, he simply cleared his throat again, to save himself from finding the words, and turned quickly, hurrying away from what was left of Himmel Street.

After a moment, their hands falling away from each other, breath catching in their throats, Rudy and Liesel followed.


	4. Reflections In A Broken Mirror

**A/N: **My computer's currently broken, so it's taking me a while to update at the moment - plus, of course, exams are almost upon us (next week! Argh!), so I really shouldn't be concentrating on fanfic. But hey, nobody said I was _sensible_!  
I had quite a lot of trouble with this chapter. I kind of hate myself for the ending, even now, but it just turned out that way. ^.^' Hopefully, it's all right, and you enjoy reading it!  
And it only remains to add; thank you for reading this far. Especially thank you for commenting. It makes my day.  
Concrit makes it even more. :)

**REFLECTIONS IN A BROKEN MIRROR**

**A TABLEAU  
The boy sits next to the girl, on a thin wooden bench in Molching Police Station. There is a doll in his lap, and  
an accordion in hers.  
The doll has yellow woollen hair and blue buttons for eyes. It is scorched from the fire, and its handstitched  
**_**dirndl**_** is stained with rust-coloured death.  
The accordion will never play again.  
The boy and the girl do not look down at the things they are holding. Pain dances in their eyes like fire,  
and there is a space of a thousand miles between them, as they sit inches apart.  
It is the distance of realisation. It cannot be broken.**

"Liesel?"

"What is it, Rudy?"

Around them, an adult world roared, beating like the blood that rushed in his ears. But it was calm around them. Still. Sharp. The eye of the storm, the too-short space between understanding and deeper realisation.

He wanted to apologise. The realisation had hit him several moments ago, as it must have hit her; that she was now an orphan twice over. That, whatever pain she had been through, it was not for the first time.

He wanted to ask her, wanted her to tell him, how it was possible that she had got over this before. How she had managed to live through the gnawing, grasping pain of loss, of betrayal.

But instead, he only said, "Do you think it was their planes, or ours?"

She didn't look at him. In both their minds, images were coalescing; a plane. A teddy bear. A dying soldier.

"Does it matter?" she asked, her voice shaking.

What an observation. Sometimes, I am still taken aback by how wise children are.

But then, neither of them was really a child any more.

Rudy fell silent again, and glanced down at the doll in his lap. Guilt gnawed at him, deep in the pit of his stomach. The button eyes seemed to be accusing him.

He had left the bear for the English pilot. But for Bettina, he had left nothing but an empty space in her arms where the doll had been.

Once, in the darkness of Gelb Street, he had admitted a truth to himself. Now, he revised it, and murmured it, raw and burning, into the clinical air of the police station.

**A POSSIBLE TRUTH  
"I guess I'm not so much better at leaving things behind, after all."**

Liesel's eyes slid sideways to his. Her hands tightened on the accordion in her lap, and she bit her lip, closing her eyes. Lemon-yellow blotted the darkness behind them. The doll's hair. The teddy bear on a dead man's shoulder. Flames. Dirty smoke.

Rudy.

She didn't dare look at him. Couldn't bear to face the pain that she had seen, naked and raw, in his blue eyes.

He could have died tonight, she thought with a pang. He could have died, or I could have died, and then who would have picked up Bettina's doll or Papa's accordion?

Then who would have been left to mourn us?

Then who would have sat in an empty room, with the gulf of loss between them, and cursing the day they let themselves care about Himmel Street and the people on it?

She sat there, fingers running over the case of Hans Hubermann's accordion. Beside her, Rudy picked up the doll and crushed it to his chest, bowing his head. When I think of that tableau, I can only think of how right she was.

Like I said, I am so much crueller than my brother.

But time marches on, and the world did not stop for Rudy and Liesel, however much they might have wished it. Either of them would gladly have sat there forever, on the hard, uncomfortable bench, in silent penance for their own survival.

Pain made the minutes and the hours meaningless. Just a number charted by the dull ticking of the clock on the wall.

But the minutes and the hours passed anyway.

The hand of the clock had moved on three hours when the door opened slowly, to let in the mayor and his fluffy-haired wife.

"Everyone is saying," she said in her whispery voice, "that there were survivors." And the policeman on duty, brow creased as he bent over his paperwork, pointed without looking up.

Leaving her husband standing at the desk, Ilsa Hermann wove her way over to the two teenaged miracles. Neither Liesel nor Rudy looked up, and for a moment, she thought they must have fallen asleep.

They weren't asleep. They would have been better off asleep, but they weren't.

Rudy was the first to see the fluffy-haired woman squatting down next to the bench. "Frau Hermann?" he asked quietly, disbelieving that even so small a part of his life was still there, and elbowed Liesel in the ribs.

She started.

Ilsa smiled brittly. "I've come to take you home," she told them quietly.

**AN UNFORTUNATE REALITY  
She was lying. She hadn't come to take them home at all. There was no home left to take them to.  
But for a moment, both of them believed her.**

"Home?" Rudy asked, frowning. He thought about home; home was his family. Home was the tailor's in Himmel Street. Home was Papa, and Mama, and brothers and sisters – but all that came to mind was Bettina's torso, bent and broken over the branch of a skeletal tree, and the rusty stain on her doll. Tears which he thought he had cried the last of sprang to his eyes.

Liesel didn't cry.

But she felt like it.

Ilsa sighed, knowing that she had said the wrong thing, but unable to take it back.

"_Komm_," she said, by way of apology, and held out her hands.

Neither Rudy nor Liesel were in any mood to take them, but both stood up. Bettina's doll dangled from his hand. She held Papa's accordion tightly against her bony chest.

And they left solace behind them as they walked outside, flanked by the Hermanns. Down the steps. The bombed streets sucked at the eye like a missing tooth in a perfect smile, black and smoking.

The car was waiting.

The mayor drove.

Ilsa sat in the front, pale hands twisting in her lap.

On the back seat, an accordion case lay like a coffin, with an absurdly cheerful, woollen-haired doll perched on it.

Rudy was still crying. Silently and subtly, but the tears would not stop tracing down his filthy cheeks, and his blue eyes were fixed on the ruins of Himmel Street, seen through glass.

**A LITTLE THOUGHT  
I wonder if the Fuhrer ever saw pain like that. Maybe he did, in the trenches, but that  
was a long time ago, and he was another man.  
But then, as Liesel said, does it matter?**

Sooty, yellow hair hung like a curtain, shrouding his face, but Liesel knew how he felt. It hurt to know, a real, physical pain deep in her heart.

He wanted to die. To wipe away everything that hurt him; the skeletons of Himmel Street, the yellow-haired doll beside him, the feeling of the juddering car under them.

That was the moment where I regretted what I had done more than anything. I can see him in my mind's eye; battered and bruised from wounds that should have – that _did_ – kill him, hands fisted in his lap, eyes on the burnt offering that was Himmel Street.

Under her breath, almost too quiet to hear, Liesel said in his ear, "_Was über einen Kuss, Saukerl_?"

**A SAD LITTLE SAYING  
There is a time and a place**

Choked with tears, burning with hate, Rudy shook his head.


	5. Kalte Spuren

**A/N: **Thirty reviews! Most I've ever got on a fic! ^^  
The title for this chapter (which means Cold Trail/Tracks/whichever else of the ten or so English synonyms you apply) is from the Schandmaul song 'Kalte Spuren', which is my theme song for the book, mostly because of the chorus, which goes '_In die kalte Asche suche ich nach deinen Spuren, habe dich verloren' _('In the cold ashes I search for your trail, I've lost you' - I think that's about right; I'm only GCSE level in German). Actually, it's my theme song for the Holocaust in general.  
Does having a theme song for mass genocide make me a bad person? I think it just might.  
Anyway. Thanks for all the love, sorry if this has been a bit of a slow update (bloody exams, bloody flu, bloody real life), and I hope you like it!

**KALTE SPUREN**

They sat on the bed together, without touching; the boy whose hair was no longer like lemons, and the book thief. The accordion case lay between them still, like a coffin.

They didn't speak. Some silences shouldn't be broken.

After a long time, Ilsa pushed the door open, quietly, and put a tray down on the table by the door.

It stood there, the two bowls of soup quietly steaming into the warm, painful silence, until Rudy finally stood up and reached for it.

"I wasn't crying," he said, passing Liesel a bowl of lukewarm soup.

"Nor was I," she agreed quickly, taking it.

"I'm angry."

"I'm not."

Rudy blinked at her. "Why not? They killed Himmel Street."

She shrugged, taking one spoonful of the half-congealed, weak soup and putting it aside. "I know. I think maybe I'll be angry. Later."

Rudy just nodded, sitting down and putting his bowl of soup, untouched, at his feet.

"We're lucky, you know," she said quietly, after another long, long moment. The soup was completely cold now.

"I don't feel lucky," he murmured, bowing his head and clasping his hands in his lap.

She shook her head. "Nor do I."

**A SHORT INTERLUDE  
It is worth remembering that not everything is confined to one place.  
In KZ-Dachau, there is a man with muddy eyes and twigs, not feathers, for hair.  
Near Vienna, there is a father, mending clothes for the army.  
In Vinnytsia, there is an enemy. His name is Adolf Hitler.  
And always, everywhere, my brother and me, and the guilt we bring along with us.**

They call it survivor's guilt. That nagging, itching feeling that you should have been the one to die, that by your death, everyone else would have been saved. I used to think it was pure human arrogance, to think that the universe revolved around each one of them like that. Now, though, after millenia of watching, I realise what it is.

It's shame.

Shame, mingled with the desire to end your own personal pain. In a universe which, really, consists of your own perceptions, ending your life ends that universe, and nobody else in it will ever die again.

But I digress.

They call it survivor's guilt. And it was destroying both Rudy and Liesel, gnawing away at them from the inside out.

They sat in silence, the soup bowls lying untouched beside them, until the afternoon was fading into evening and, far out of sight, the last embers of Himmel Street had long been extinguished. They sat there until the moon rose, with their hands clasped limply in their laps and their eyes cast downwards; a seemingly endless vigil for a dead world.

They sat there until Ilsa, who could be quite stubborn in a soft-spoken kind of way, pushed the door open and stood there, silhouetted against the dim light of the hallway, looking into the even dimmer light of the unlit room.

"I've run you a bath," she said eventually, walking in for long enough to pick up their discarded soup bowls. She looked, Rudy thought, like a deer that has just seen the hunters coming; her eyes were wide and almost pleading, and she seemed to shiver slightly.

Straightening up, she hastened back to the hallway, then glanced back over her shoulder and beckoned. Reluctantly, almost lethargically, Rudy and Liesel stood up and shuffled after her. They didn't look at Ilsa, or at each other, or at the pictures hanging on the walls; their eyes, as they shambled down the hall after her, were resolutely on their scuffed shoes, their dirty legs.

Rudy was still in his pyjamas. They flapped oddly around his long legs as he walked. They were filthy, torn, thick with dust and mud, and they left several inches of bare ankle; they were old, and he had grown. His shoes had been donated by one of the policemen, who had stood there solemnly in his socks while Rudy put them on; they were battered and badly-kept, and at least two sizes too big.

Liesel hadn't been to bed the night before, and she was still in her school uniform. The long stockings pooled around her ankles in ripples of grey wool, showing off scabbed knees and legs black with dust. Her skirt was torn; her shoes had lost any shine left in them.

They both looked thoroughly wretched.

Even after the bath, dressed for the moment in cast-offs from the Mayor and his wife – Rudy came off worst in that exchange; the Mayor was neither tall nor thin, and his clothes managed the interesting feat of being at once too big and too small for a gangly, underfed teenager – they looked thoroughly wretched. They sat at the table in the kitchen, bare feet hanging under their chairs and food still lying mostly untouched in front of them, and they felt every bit as wretched as they looked.

"You can have the spare room," the Mayor told them. He looked slightly unnerved by their absolute stillness, shifting from foot to foot as he sipped at a mug of beer. "One of you will have to sleep on the floor. We can give you blankets."

"_Danke schön._"

"_Danke schön._"

The Mayor managed a small, bitter smile.

"_Bitte_."

**A SMALL, BUT IMPORTANT, FACT  
They both knew which one of them would be sleeping on the floor.  
He wouldn't have let Liesel make do with the planks – and nor would she.**

It was cold in the spare room, and it would be, once the lights went out, very dark indeed.

Neither of them wanted to be there. But where they wanted to be, where they really wanted to be, no longer existed.

Rudy pulled off his shirt, shivering in the winter air, then looked at Liesel. With what might have been the first tendrils of his old self creeping back into his voice, he said authoritatively, "Close your eyes. Don't look."

**A SECRET  
She did.**

They lay in the darkness, sleepless, restless, bound up with blankets and nightmares.

Rudy stared up at the ceiling. The polished wooden boards were hard against his back; he had moved the rug to try and soften them, but he could feel every crack, every head of every nail, with a peculiar clarity. Under the blankets, his fists were clenched. Anger boiled at the back of his mind.

At last, exhausted by rage, he fell asleep.

Liesel's eyes were closed, but it didn't stop her seeing. Every door opening and closing downstairs, every muffled whisper, and, eventually, every one of the Mayor's quiet snores in the next room made her flinch. The mattress seemed lumpy and odd, and when she closed her hand on the pillow, hoping for comfort, there was only the thin rustle of feathers and the knowledge that Papa wouldn't be waiting if she cried.

At last, unable to bear waking, she fell asleep.

Outside, in what had been Himmel Street the night before, the wind rose. Cold ashes gusted in drifts across footprints, and hid the place where a book thief and a boy with hair like lemons had stood, hand-in-hand, and watched the world burn.

-----

**A/N (translation note): **For those who don't know, 'bitte' or 'bitte schön' is the German equivalent of 'you're welcome'. And for those who do, yes, it should technically have been the second one.


	6. Lost In The Shadows

**A/N:** Lots of anonymous reviews at the moment (by my standards, anyway), so if you were one of the people who reviewed (anonymously or otherwise, actually), thanks! It's really nice to get so much flattery... XD However, I continue to not be Markus Zusak.  
And I'm sorry, PurpleShamrock, but it appears that I really _can't _do non-somber at the moment. :p My bad. I tried.

**LOST IN THE SHADOWS**

Things are never as simple as they seem, are they? It should have been relatively easy for the Hermanns to take Rudy and Liesel in. Not painless, not riskless, but easy. But it wasn't.

For one thing, there was the issue of clothes. Much to his chagrin, Rudy was still confined to a choice of the mayor's clothes, with their peculiar trick of not fitting him in any direction, or his filthy, ragged pyjamas.

And that's where the trouble started.

**A CONVERSATION  
"Ilsa?"  
**"_**Ja?**_**"  
**"**That Steiner boy**_** is**_** about the same size, isn't he?"  
**"**We can't…"  
**"**What else are we going to do? We can't buy him new ones, not right now."  
A pause.  
**"**Ilsa?"  
**"**..**_**Ja**_**."**

That was the reason that, on October 3, 1943, Ilsa and Heinz Hermann found themselves in the attic, elbow-deep in memories. It was an old house, and like so many old houses, it accumulated treasures.

"We could sell these," Heinz commented, holding up a pair of tarnished silver candlesticks. "_Warum nichts?_ Nobody will ever use them, not now."

The look Ilsa gave him, reproachful and sad, made him drop them hurriedly. "All right. All right. _'S tut mir leid_." Frowning, he turned and started to rifle through the piles of junk again. "It was just a thought."

She nodded, expressionless, and pulled aside a child's rocking horse, placing it neatly to one side.

"Heinz," she whispered, turning her head.

Nodding, he hurried over to her side, and sighed. His hand rested briefly on her arm. It was a comfort to her, but only a little. Cobwebs catching in her fluffy hair like silk, she leant over and helped him to pull free the trunk. It was a heavy thing, leather-bound and embossed neatly with the Gothic letters _Johann Hermann_.

Neither of them spoke. The mayor looked at his wife, her skin grey with dust and her eyes creased with years of longing, and wanted to say something, but the words shrivelled in his mouth. Instead, grunting with effort, he managed to turn the key in the lock of the trunk, stiff from years of disuse.

"I think they ought to do," he said after a moment, a little uncomfortably, pulling out a shirt and trousers. Holding them up to what little light there was, he looked them over with an assessing eye. "They'll be a bit short for him, but they're better than what we've got. We can get him some shoes later."

A suit. A school uniform, with an indignant spider caught in one cuff. A loose shirt. Socks. Underpants. Braces. Heinz took all of them out, on by one, looping them over his arm until he looked about to be buried in musty-smelling cloth. The army jacket, buried at the bottom of the trunk, ripped and stained almost past recognition, he pulled out for a moment, too; held it close to his chest for a moment, something between a smile and a grimace written on his face. Then, swallowing, he cleared his throat. "We can't give him that, anyway," he said hoarsely to Ilsa, whose face had crumpled like scrunched-up newspaper, and lifted the jacket gently, reverentially, back into the trunk. He could have been holding a child, he carried it so carefully. And when he closed the lid on it, turning the key with a grinding click, it was as though a ghost which had been haunting them had suddenly been pushed back into the shadows.

Sneezing as the dust billowed up from the closed lid, Heinz stooped to pick up the belt that had fallen off the top of his pile, then stepped back to let Ilsa past.

**A SMALL, SAD FACT  
The jacket, like the man who had worn it, would never be seen again.**

Downstairs, although the clock on the wall pronounced it to be nearly noon, the two survivors were only just waking up. Grief is a tiring business, and sometimes, sleep is the best cure for it.

Despite that, Liesel and Rudy both woke with a peculiar numbness making their limbs heavy. In Rudy's case, of course, that could have been best explained by the fact that he had been sleeping on hard boards all night. In Liesel's case, though, there was no real explanation, no reason for that heaviness, except that a cold heart can freeze the rest of the body along with it.

"What are we going to do?" Rudy asked quietly. It wasn't meant to be answered, but Liesel answered it anyway.

"Nothing."

What else was there to do? They both thought it at once.

The fact is, nothing is one of the hardest things to do. It's easy to _feel_ like you're doing nothing, but really, absolutely doing nothing is the closest thing to impossible there is.

Liesel and Rudy weren't doing nothing.

They were waiting.

Rudy sat up, holding his blanket around his waist, and cast around for his clothes. He was halfway into the too-small, too-big aftershave smell of the mayor's clothes when there was a knock on the door.

"_Für dich_," Heinz said shortly, when Rudy stood up to open it, and pushed a neatly-folded pile of clothes into the boy's arms. For you.

Rudy blinked at the clothes, not knowing where they had come from, not knowing how the mayor could possibly have come by them so quickly. Then again, what did it matter? It was better than his current state, dressed as he was in too-short trousers which barely managed to stay on his narrow hips and a shirt which pulled up to his protruding ribs whenever he moved his arms.

"_Danke schön, Herr Hermann._"

"_Bitte schön, Herr Steiner._" Nodding a brief acknowledgement, the mayor withdrew hurriedly, feeling a stranger in his own home.

**A LITTLE NOTE  
For years afterwards, Liesel's strongest memory of those few days was that moment.  
She sat up in bed, the blanket wrapped around her like a dress. Rudy stood there, holding a dead man's clothes.  
The daylight streamed in, turning his skin, for a moment, as golden as his hair, and he watched her watching him.**

"Turn away," he told her, glaring. He looked, for a moment, so comical that she couldn't help smiling; his hair caught in a wild tangle from his troubled sleep, his shirt and trousers several sizes too small and several more sizes too wide, and that expression of embarassed irritation trapped on his face.

But she turned away anyway – quickly, so he wouldn't see her smirking.

This time, concentrating on dressing under the blankets so he wouldn't see, she didn't look.

And when, tired and messy, the two of them finally came down to sit in stony silence at the kitchen table, they couldn't understand why Heinz and Ilsa Hermann couldn't bring themselves to look, either.


	7. A Heart, Once Broken

**A/N: **Bloody hell! It got past 50 reviews while I wasn't looking! *jawdrop*  
I'm sorry I haven't updated in so long. I have had writer's block like you would not _believe_, and once I got to about halfway through this chapter, I seriously couldn't think where to go. I think my problem is that the story's getting less and less plot-driven, and I don't work too well without a vague sense of plot. The writing was fine, but it was going round and round in sort of aimless circles without me really noticing.  
I think this chapter should help it get back onto the straight and narrow. ^-^ Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, and thanks for all the love you've given me! ^_^  
Enjoy the chapter!

**A HEART, ONCE BROKEN**

It was raining.

This wasn't the slow, soft rain of dreams. This wasn't a distant summer haze. This was rain, real, torrential rain that came down in thundering sheets, roaring like a wild beast against the roofs and shaking at the windows, as though trying to get in. The world outside was turned to crashing silver fishscales, the window panes rendered opaque by the water that ran down it. It smelt of agelessness and of the chill in one's bones on a winter night. It screamed for attention as every eye in Molching was forced away from the unreadable windows.

Liesel and Rudy sat together on the floor of the library, watching the rain cascade down the windows she had once climbed through.

Even surrounded by books, she wasn't reading, and he felt no desire to get up. They simply sat there, curled together against a bookshelf, and watched.

They had been at the mayor's house for a week, and already, it was hard to believe that they had lived anywhere else.

Had they really had homes once? School? Family? It all seemed so far away now, so distant, like a memory of a dream. The pain of that loss had whittled away at them, softly, softly, until they felt pared down to almost nothing. All that was left was to hope, somehow, that they could be rebuilt from that nothingness, that core. Hope that, somehow, they might bring their lives back again.

Until then, all they could do was wait.

**THE TRUTH OF WAITING  
Waiting is one of the hardest things to do.  
Waiting without hope is almost impossible.  
Luckily for Rudy and Liesel, they both had hope.**

Rudy dreamed of his father.

Liesel dreamed of a man with muddy eyes and hair like feathers or like twigs.

Together, coiled in the shadows of the silent, looming bookshelves, they dreamed. Dreamed, as the rain thundered at the window, as the wind chased itself around the house, as the closed pages of the books on the shelves stared down at them. Their eyes were open, but they were dreaming, and they didn't even hear Herr Hermann walk into the library, closing the door behind him.

One thing I know about Heinz Hermann for certain is this; he was a good man. Whatever he did, whatever may have happened to him later on in life, he was a good man, and he didn't deserve his fate. Under the bluster and the self-importance, he was a good man, and a kind man. His son's death had struck him deep, and who can blame him?

But good and kind does not necessarily equate to right, and maybe things would have been better if he hadn't been there at all. Who knows? I don't know what might have been, or what should have happened. After all, wasn't that why I took Rudy from my brother's arms in the first place?

"Horrible weather," Heinz commented after a moment, sitting down in one of the chairs scattered around, and stretched his legs out with a sigh. "With this rain, even God Himself would seem dull and dark."

Neither of the children moved. Neither of the children spoke.

Heinz sighed, and tried again.

"Sometimes things seem darker in weather like this, don't they?" he said with a false, brittle brightness, to stony silence.

**A SMALL FACT, UNREALISED  
It was raining the day my brother took Johann Hermann.  
Torrential rain. It fell with the shells, and his body hung on the barbed wire as I passed, heading for Alsace.  
Heinz had forgotten this. Ilsa had forgotten this.  
I have not.**

Again, Heinz sighed, heavier this time. This was unfamiliar territory – the library, the children, the raw, undiluted grief. Once again, that feeling that he was a stranger in his own home.

"What I'm saying is…" he started again.

"We know what you're saying," Rudy said flatly, "sir." He had shifted slightly, careful not to disturb Liesel, whose head rested against his chest, but far enough that he could look back at the mayor. "Things seem worse in weather like this. Maybe you're right."

"He's not."

Taken aback by this blunt rebuffal from Liesel, Heinz opened and closed his mouth for a moment. He hadn't talked to Liesel much, and the impression he had formed was that she was polite, if quiet. He would hardly have imagined that she would contradict him quite so openly.

In fact, he didn't know her at all.

"What do you mean, I'm not?" he asked after a moment, keeping his voice carefully level. "I think I know…"

"It can't seem worse than it is," she said brusquely, settling back against Rudy's chest again, with her bare feet tucked under her. "It _can't_."

Heinz opened his mouth again, to counter her assertion, then closed it sharply. He remembered now. He remembered the flooding rains the day the news had come; he remembered sitting at the kitchen table, Ilsa's hands clasped in his, staring at the scrubbed wood; he remembered the feeling of hopelessness. He remembered not crying.

More than anything, though, he remembered how it had felt. It would have felt as bad if it had been summer or winter, rain or sun or snow. It wasn't the weather. It was the facts of the matter. The world falling apart around you.

And he had only lost one son. These two… they had lost everything.

"Liesel…" he started, his tones unusually quiet and unusually gentle. But before he could get any further, there was a sharp knock at the front door. All three of them – Rudy, Liesel, and Heinz Hermann – looked up sharply at the sound.

"What sort of an idiot is out in this weather?" he grumbled irritably, levering himself out of the chair to go and answer the door.

On the doorstep, with his hair plastered to his head and water dripping off skin shiny from the rain, a broken man was waiting. It was obvious in his eyes, and in his mouth, and in the way he held himself, shoulders drooping and head bowed. In one hand, he held a full trunk, the leather worn thin and cracked in places. His coat was pulled up past his chin, obscuring most of his face. He had no umbrella.

The man on the doorstep was a man in pieces.

**THE NAME OF THE MAN  
Alex Steiner**


	8. Tangled Lives

**A/N: **Yes! I finally managed to update! I'm afraid it's another short chapter, because I sort of ended up forgetting where I'd been planning to take the last chapter, but I'm still pretty proud of it, all told.  
And, again, I'm _overwhelmed_ by the response. I know I keep saying this, and it's probably getting monotonous, but it seems like every time I look, there's a new response, and they _all_ say nice things! I've never had quite such a confidence boost as this story is turning out to be. ^.^ So thank you for all the reviews, favourites, and story adds - they mean so, so much to me!  
Aaaaand... I'm going to stop with the Oscar-acceptance speech now and let you read the goddamn story. The Book Thief is still not mine.

**TANGLED LIVES**

"_Die Kinder_?"

The voice was a whisper of a dying hope, and, still huddled in the library with their arms around each other, the two children didn't heard it at all. Even Heinz, whose bluster had vanished the second he pulled the door open and saw the broken figure outside, barely managed to make the words out.

"_Entschuldigung_? What did you say?" he asked, looking out at the pelting rain and the figure who seemed to have melted out of it.

Alex Steiner lifted his head. Rainwater dripped sluggishly from the hair plastered over his face, clinging in quicksilver droplets to the tips of the dark clumps. Under the turned-up collar of his coat, his jaw tightened, and he swallowed hard. His eyes, the same blue as Rudy's, were burning with desperation and determination.

Heinz took half a step back, slightly frightened by this visitation who seemed to be made entirely out of pain. Alex didn't even notice.

"_Die Kinder_," he repeated, his voice clearer now, just about audible in the library, where Rudy and Liesel had almost stopped breathing to listen. "The children. Everywhere I go, everyone I talk to tells me the same story… everything was destroyed. Everything. Except the children." His voice cracked. It was a miracle, but not the miracle he would have asked for, and his heart was still shattered into pieces by the news of the bomb. "Mayor Hermann, I am begging you. Tell me, which children? A boy and a girl, they are saying, but _who_?"

Gathering himself together, Heinz stepped aside. "You'd better come in," he said with a smile, the kind of comforting, hand-shaking smile that he used while doing his job. It strikes me as odd that the most reassuring smiles always seem to come from people who are least reassured by them. Another human oddity. And Heinz Hermann was very far from reassured about anything.

With a tiny nod and an even tinier smile, Alex stepped over the threshold, closing the door after him and standing, dripping, on the mat just inside, which was already soaking wet. After a moment's thought, he turned down his collar, then continued to stand there, like a ghost who had for no reason decided to become solid.

"Steiner, yes?" Heinz said, businesslike now. "You run – _ran_ – the tailor's on Himmel Street."

Alex just nodded. He seemed to have used up his words.

"Well, Herr Steiner… take your coat off, won't you? We're not about to send you back out into that weather. Herr Steiner, as a matter of fact…" How difficult it was for him to give the man hope! Somehow, almost as difficult as it would have been to tell him that he'd come on a fool's errand and there was nobody here for him at all. Why was it so hard?

But Heinz Hermann was relieved of his difficulties by a quiet voice from the doorway of the library. It was hesitant, it was cracking, and it was muffled by tears.

**ONE WORD, WHICH MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE  
**"**Papa?"**

Heinz shut his mouth sharply.

Rudy stumbled into the hallway, his blue eyes narrowed by the effort of not crying. After a moment, Liesel stood up and followed him, but only as far as the door, where she could get the best view.

"Rudy?" Alex's voice cracked on the second syllable, making him sound like a nervous teenager. He had stopped halfway through taking his coat off, and it still hung like a dead thing from on crooked arm.

Rudy nodded, taking another hesitant step towards the bent figure with the rain-darkened hair. And another step. And another. His feet felt like lead; walking was like trying to struggle through tar. But he walked anyway, feeling hot tears build up behind his eyes, eyes that were fixed on his father. Liesel, Heinz, Ilsa – they were all forgotten for the moment. Alex had become his world.

"It's me." The words sounded absurd, thick and heavy. "Papa… oh, Crucified Christ!" Suddenly, the tar around his feet vanished, and he almost ran the last few paces, pushing past Heinz as if the mayor wasn't even there. When he reached the silent, heartbroken figure, he flung his arms around his Papa's chest, burying his face in his shoulder as if it were ten years ago and Rudy was still a child. As if, by closing his eyes and hugging Papa as tightly as he could, he could somehow make it _be_ all those years ago, make it so that when he opened his eyes again, everything would be as it was.

He was crying. For the first time since they had left Himmel Street smoking and in pieces, he was crying. And he barely even noticed.

Alex was crying too. Clinging onto Rudy as a drowning man clings to a lifebouy, he rested his head on his son's shoulder (not his head, Rudy was too tall for that now, but his shoulder) and cried like a baby.

**WORDS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SAID  
**"**Thank God."  
**"**I was so afraid."  
**"**I thought I'd lost you."**

**WHY THEY WERE NOT  
****That would have pared things down, in the end, to just those words.  
****Words weren't needed, or wanted. Everything that could be said had been said already.**

Rudy's arm was tangled up in Alex's coat. With a little sob, he shook it off and buried his face in his father's shoulder again. His heart was so full of emotion, roiling and churning, that he felt sure it would burst; joy, pain, grief, and always, always, that all-consuming anger.

_They did this to us. I'm going to kill them_.

But who _they_ were didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing except the smell of rain and the feel of wet fabric making his cheek just as wet and the warmth of the one man in the world he had been most waiting, hoping, _praying_ to see.

Papa.

His tears dribbled down his chin, mixing with the rainwater that was smudged all over his face now, and he was smiling.

Papa.

Thank God. Thank Christ. Thank whoever the hell was listening.

_Papa_.

Who knew how long the two of them stood there like that, the dripping stranger with a broken heart and the boy with hair like lemons, just standing there and holding each other as if they never meant to let go? Liesel certainly didn't. And she didn't care, either. There was another emotion gnawing at _her_ heart, one of the few at that moment which was alien to Rudy's.

**DUDEN DICTIONARY WORD  
_Neid_ – jealousy**

Reason is alien to the grieving. But Liesel's jealousy had a very good reason, and that only helped it to worm deeper, begin to bite, begin to curse.

_He has a father. He has a family. He has love._

_I have nothing._

With a little sob, she ran past Heinz, past the Steiners, and out into the pelting, roaring silver of the rain.

_I have nothing._

_Not even Rudy._


	9. Under The Quicksilver Rain

**A/N: **THIS IS SO NOT HOW THIS CHAPTER WAS MEANT TO GO!  
For some reason, this was a really hard chapter to write, though. Not helped by the fact that the half-finished version I had on USB was LOST when my gorram USB stick BROKE!  
Still. I quite like how this turned out, even if it totally screwed up my long-term plan for the story. Hope you do too. And the Book Thief is STILL still still not mine.  
Oh, and by the way? OVER 100 REVIEWS! I FEEL SO LOVED! ASDFJKL!

**EDIT: **I know some people have been saying they're waiting for the next chapter.  
There will be no next chapter. I'm firmly of the opinion that, even though I didn't _mean_ it to end here, it's reached its natural end. I'll probably write a sequel fic some time.

**UNDER THE QUICKSILVER RAIN**

She could have gone on running forever.

She certainly wanted to.

The rain roared around her, no quieter here in the open; it screamed and thundered and pelted down into puddles with surfaces too shattered by ripples to reflect. The sky was the heavy, dull navy of a thundery dusk; it was dark and wet and the wind raged around her, tugging her hair out of its loose, messy plaits. It smelt as heavy as it looked, that thick, clinging smell of a downpour, thick with clouds and chimney smoke and heartbreak.

And she went on running.

She didn't seem to have a direction, but I think, even so, she knew where she would end up. It called to her, through the deafening downpour, sullen and hateful and irresistable.

It came as no surprise, not to me, not to her, not to anyone, that when she collapsed onto her hands and knees, sobbing for breath, it was in the blackened, skeletal remains of what had once been Himmel Street. The rain flooded around her, soaking her to the skin; the woollen winter dress Ilsa had lent her felt almost as heavy as her heart.

Any reason she had, she had left behind at the mayor's house, and now there were only the tears, clogging up her throat and clutching at her chest. It hurt. It hurt worse than anything, and it came home to her; they were gone. All of them. Everyone. Everything. She was kneeling in an ankle-deep puddle in the middle of Himmel Street, but it wasn't Himmel Street. It was a graveyard.

Nothing was left, she thought, and a fresh wave of sobs caught in her throat. Nothing held, nothing was left, nothing ever, ever lasted. Only her.

As I've said before, I can be so much crueller than my brother.

Thinking of her there, curled up and sobbing on the edge of the shattered road, in the half-cleared ruins of the only home she could remember, I feel so guilty. So ashamed. I knew what would have happened if I'd let my brother take Rudy; perhaps it would have been better that way. She had so much pain locked away in her.

But then, if I hadn't taken Rudy's life back, she wouldn't have got the ending she did. So perhaps I was right, after all.

At that moment, though, she was cursing me, and I know it. She was crouched in the gutter, howling like a wild animal, her thin shoulders shaking with cold and stress and absolute misery.

**A THOUGHT**  
**Grief is an odd thing. Things can set it running again.  
But there's nothing that can stop it.**

The broken wasteland stretched around her, into forever. She knelt there, on all fours, for longer than she knew, while the rain pelted down around her and the last of the light faded away; she knelt there, sobbing, until her tears finally ran out, and, numbly, she got to her feet. Black mud was plastered to her knees, dribbling down her stockings and onto her old school shoes in pale, greyish rivulets on the pale, greyish dress.

She didn't speak. Her throat felt dry and empty, her eyes burnt from crying, and she was dumb. For a moment, she tried to shape words, to say something that would make a break in the thunder and splashing rain.

Nothing came.

Pressing her lips together, she wiped her sodden face with an equally sodden sleeve, and stumbled down the ghostly street, feet shuffling in the river that the road was quickly turning into. It was dark, but she knew where she was going. On and on, staggering away from the lights of the mayor's house, just visible through the clinging darkness. The rain filled her shoes; the wind had pulled the last of her hair free from its plaits, so that it swung heavily over her face, blinding her.

Her eyes were closed, her arms hanging dead at her sides. She shuffled on, half-hypnotised, trusting in memory to guide her, and in the rubble of the Hubermann household, she finally stopped.

"I'm sorry." Her voice was choked, creaky from what felt like years of disuse, although it had been less than an hour since she had run out of the house, out of the family that wasn't hers and the relief she'd never have for herself. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She'd thought she'd cried the last of her tears out, but they were fighting their way out again, burning and itching at her closed eyes. Over and over again, she repeated those two words; _I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry._ She didn't even know what she was sorry for. Maybe she didn't need to know.

She might have been sorry they were dead.

She might have been sorry she was alive.

Whatever it was, she stayed there for longer than she knew, tears and rainwater dribbling down her face as she stood in the kitchen of a house that wasn't there any more, apologising to thin air until her throat grew hoarse and her legs collapsed from under her. She landed in an undignified heap on what had been a rug before the bomb hit, curled into herself and racked with sobs.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I loved you. I love you. I'm sorry."

And then, from behind her, a hand on her shoulder, making her jump and almost scream, but the scream coiled into another set of boiling, gasping sobs in her throat.

And a voice; a voice, quiet and hoarse, that she knew all too well.

"I'm sorry, too."

**A SMALL POINT****  
She knew where she would end up.  
Is it any surprise that he did, too?**

He sat down next to her, in the splashing rainwater, and put his arms around her. His lemon-yellow hair was darkened by the rain, and he smelt of nothingness.

After a moment, she put her arms around him, as well, and sobbed into his shoulder in the rushing rainwater until everything was washed away. Her grief, his happiness, the ruins around them – everything was washed away but the two of them, children who hadn't been children since the raid, clinging to each other in the torrential rain.

Eventually, her sobs petered out, but he didn't let go of her. His eyes were closed, his overlong blonde hair hanging over them in lank, rain-slicked clumps, and he was barely aware that he was still holding her.

Her throat seemed to have opened up for the first time since she had seen Alex Steiner at the door, and she was smiling very, very faintly through her tears.

He didn't hate her.

He'd missed her.

He'd known where to find her.

**AN AMENDMENT  
Grief is an odd thing. Things can set it running again.  
But there's one thing that can stop it.**

Neither of them was ever quite sure who drew back first, or who spoke, quietly, hoarsely, and utterly seriously. But both of them knew the words that were said.

The kiss was awkward and hesitant, and it tasted bitterly of rainwater and tears. The storm raged around them, the darkness was almost complete, and both of them were exhausted from grief and happiness both.

It was far from perfect. It wasn't, I think, how either of them had expected it to go.

In the formlessness of destruction, the two shapes of the book thief and the boy with hair like lemons melded into one.

And it was so much more than just perfect.

**DAS ENDE  
Aber etwas beginnt.**


End file.
